Gut Wrenching Four former content moderators have filed a petition with the Kenyan government asking for an investigation into the content moderation company Sama, on grounds that workers were subjected to exploitative and harmful conditions during an eight-month contract with OpenAI between 2021 and 2022, The Guardian reports. In the filing, per the Guardian, former ChatGPT moderators say they weren’t properly warned about the brutality of the content that they would be tasked to moderate — and then paid between $1.46 and $3.74 to review “graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest” during the training of OpenAI products. Then, when Sama’s contract with OpenAI ended suddenly, the workers say they were given no support to deal with the lasting psychological effects of their moderation labor. “It has really damaged my mental health,” 27-year-old Mophat Okinyi, one of the four plaintiffs in the suit, told the Guardian of his experience doing moderation work for the OpenAI-contracted firm Sama. After reading graphic texts about rape, Okinyi told the newspaper, he became paranoid and withdrawn; his pregnant wife ultimately left him, saying he was a changed man. “I lost my family,” Okinyi told the Guardian. Invisible Human Infrastructure Twenty-eight-year-old petitioner Alex Kairu told the Guardian a similar story: that as a result of ChatGPT moderation work, his relationship with his wife has suffered, and he’s been forced to move back in with his parents. “It has destroyed me completely,” Kairu told the newspaper. Specifically, the former ChatGPT moderators are asking…Contractors Say OpenAI Psychologically Scarred Them for $2/Hour